Millennials, Parents and Grandparents: Family Transmission of Religion (and Non-Religion)

[00:00:00]okay why don't we go ahead and get started it's my great pleasure to introduce uh Dr Vern bangson who is here visiting us from the University of Southern uh California where he is Professor in the School of Social Work there um but before that um held the an AARP University a chair and was uh for many years part of the and Center there on on gerontology uh Dr bangson is a president of the gerontological Society of America among many other uh uh prestigious posts and awards um and a kind of living legend if you'll allow me to say that uh in the field than dead de in um in the field of gerontology and theories of aging and the sociology of aging and in family sociology you'll see in his presentation today how all of those strands of his work kind of uh have have come to come together in in in a brand new way um he's going to uh base his talk today on a brand new book called families and Faith how religion is passed down across Generations um with Oxford University press and again it's my honor to welcome him as a collaborator as a friend and as a mentor and um we all feel um delighted to have you in our presence today so Bur [Music] [Applause] please well thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here um it's not my first visit to Oregon State uh this university has a long and distinguished history in many ways but one of them is the um the conference on Aging that's uh been held here for many years and I've been invited here twice to par participate in that uh but also over the years I've had many colleagues and friends that have come from here in this program Alexis Walker was a special friend of mine um Of course Karen hooker and uh Carolyn aldwin have been colleagues over the years whose work I have admired and and uh respected um Alan acok who sitting back there um trying to the trouble [Music] uh he and I worked together on the longitudinal study of generations the data from which I'm going to talk about today uh in the 1970s when the study just began and I owe him a great Deb of gratitude for the design and some of the statistical sophistication of that study and he and I put together a paper which is published in the Journal of marriage and the family about Mother's versus father's influence on um on children and that was awarded the Ruben Hill prize from the National Council on family relations and I've always cherished that it's uh still um cited today by the way in in Publications so um Guru genius Obi Kenobi it's good to see you again uh and then there's of course sedon uh who I've known for quite a while now and whose work I've always admired he's a polymath he knows an awful lot about an awful lot of aspects of uh not only adulthood and aging but also adolescence and aging and uh the whole lifespan um his interest in theory has taken him to many different branches of issues of adult development in aging and uh his Handbook of the sociology is of course uh one of the best resources um internationally regarded uh in the field of Aging some really upto-date and uh informative perspectives theoretical perspectives on the lifespan as it has to do with aging and not just the agent and for so many years the field of gerontology especially in the social sciences has suffered from a preoccupation of the Aged ignoring the fact that the Aged get there by a process of Aging so thank you so much for all the inspiration that you've given to me and thank you for working me so desperately hard the last two days not giving me a chance to more sleep more than a few hours a night uh in the handbook of theories of Aging that we're putting together uh today I want to talk about families and aging and I'll start by introducing you to my great great grandparents this is Carl and Sophia Johansson a photograph taken in their living room in HUD that's Sweden and this is a room that I visited just 11 months ago I didn't take this picture then but uh it's a house next to a Mill and the property is still in my family in and you'll notice the book that's open in the LA of my great great grandfather Carl that is the family bible which came into the family in 1846 um Family lore has it that the father of U Carl traded six months wages for that precious Bible and this is an indication of a new religious movement that swept through northern Europe at that time the ptic Revival movement they were fervent evangelicals what I want to talk about today are millennials and generational differences social change and the crisis of family values that according to some people we find ourselves in today parents influence on religious values or the data show non-religious families and value transmission the unexpected influence of grand parents life cycle trajectories of religion these are all topics that not much has been written on except in the popular media where it is largely supposed that religion is dying out in America and especially it's dying out because of generational differences you read the uh the uh headlines in last week's newspapers Millennials are leaving the church and drov um there's a crisis in America religion is on the decline in the United States well we'll talk about whether these things are true um Millennials and generational differences is the place where we'll start and this is Carl Johansson's family um he had uh nine children six of them immigrated to America imagine yourself as a parent seeing that 2third of your children leave and you never see them again the rest of your life or their lives that's what happened imagine also if you had a particular set of values that were terribly important to you and you wanted to pass them on and they left and you never saw them again how lasting would be your influence on your children's values well Carl Johansson's influence was significant all of those six that immigrated carried that Swedish Evangelical Mission oriented tradition into Iowa Minnesota and Kansas and join churches there like-minded evangelicals that's my grandmother who is in the front row on the right and uh she was one of those who left Millennials are different from their Elders as we see in a lot of polls um they're more liberal less conservative than their Elders more believe that illegal immigrants should receive citizenship for example many more agree that same-sex couples should be given um the legal rights of marriage just like everybody else they're more racially diverse than older Generations they're more likely to vote or identify as Democrats 51% of Millennials identify with a Democratic party versus for example uh 39% of those in the SoCal silent generation who were born um up until 1944 in religion 2 we see contrast fewer Millennials are affiliated with religious groups you see a figure of anywhere from 33 to 37% of Millennials being not associated with any religious organization and in part depends on the sample and the age range um of the respondent but in general oneir compared to only 18% of those who are older uh claim no religious affiliation but it's interesting and this gets to another part of the story that I want to get into what is it does it mean to be religious ask about church of iation you can ask about church attendance and then you can ask about belief in God they're not that different in the percentage who believe in God to their elders but they are different if you ask about spirituality more Millennials than any other group say well I'm not religious but I am spiritual so there are differences and this is the data that we're these are the data that we released last week that created such a u an impact in the mass media here you see the difference between Generations but also the difference in just seven years in the way in which people responded to a survey asking whether they had religious affiliation or not you see here that U the silent generation in 2007 those born up until 194 but only 9% of them in 2007 reported they had no religious affiliation 14% of baby boomers 19% of generation xers and 25% of older Millennials reported no religious affiliation in 2014 Just 7 years later Figures were all up but up to 34% of Millennials in the younger AG room and 36% of older Millennials so this table reports to tell two stories and I'll put these in the sensationalist terms in which they were reported in the mass media number one there's a generational Trend in which Americans are becoming less and less religious number two there's an age Gap in religiosity there's a generational Gap in terms of younger people being less and less religious okay so you see the two pictures America is moving downward in religion and there's an age cleavage in religion okay see the two two different stories I like that dance thank so Millennials therefore are leaving the church in droves right wait a minute we got a sample of Millennials in N 2007 and a sample of Millennials in 2014 that doesn't mean Millennials are leaving the church this means you sampled two different groups of people see this is what social scientists should always say to journalists wait a minute your interpretation of the data Americans who consider themselves Christian has left 8% that means America is becoming less religious wait a minute does Church attendance equate to religiosity so how significant are these differences what extent is there a generation gap in values and behavior pertaining to religion our families because this is the under the the other underlying theme of these headlines families are not passing on their religion these data show that young people are abandoning their parentals their parents' Faith well let's get them to the issue of social change because that's part of what this Grand Story is and this is a picture of uh a family that's in the midst of social change this is my great great grandfather my great grandfather and my grandfather and my grandmother my grandfather is standing on the left he's a young man this is family solidarity in Sweden during Harvest Time the whole family galles together the family was an economic unit it was a working unit it was also a religious unit they all went to to church on time it was the educational unit because um there were not any schools in rur Sweden the family performed many many functions that families do not perform today and some observers in the early 20 Century suggested like Ernest Burgess who is briefly my professor at the University of Chicago suggested that because the family had undergone so much change in the face of modernity it had lost its functions it's really interesting is that some sociologists in the late 20th century were saying exactly the same thing David poeno a demographer family demographer at the University of Texas Austin published a paper in the Journal of marriage and the family in 1992 saying once again that the family was in decline because it had lost all its functions he pointed the finger to divorce he also said there was a family values crisis in American society he didn't say that in his journal of marriage and family article he did say that in the um Council of American Family Values piece the uh a group that some of you from probably familiar with here's the other picture of the Pew report is it shows how much Christian religions organized religious bodies um have lost in just seven years and how much those who say no religion non affiliation the non Affiliated individual population has increase and you can see there that Catholics have declined in membership Mainline Protestants have declined in men me membership the unaffiliated have increased non-Christian faiths have slightly increased uh the message for Catholics is that it's even worse than it looks because um American Catholicism among whites has plummeted these figures do not show that because immigration from Mexico from South America has swelled the ranks of otherwise almost vacant pews and um the vacancies in uh the nons Sunbelt States um are enormous uh for Mainland line Protestants Presbyterian Church the Methodist Church the Le Episcopal Church United Church of Christ those membership declines were steep in the 1980s and 1990s leveled off in the 2000s now they appear to be going down once again so religion is on the decline is religion on the decline or are those who bother to join a church on the decline does church membership mean what it did in 1950 does Church attendance mean what it did in 1950 what's happened in the last 50 years we've had enormous changes in public respect for social institutions such as the church in cultural values such as an increase in individualism you all know about uh uh David uh Robert putnam's um book bowling alone how many of you know what that means okay I I'll tell the story uh Robert puam uh did a a essentially an ethnography of a town in Indiana um in the 1970s early 1970s I think it was and one of the things he observed is that much of the social interaction much of the social cohesion of this small farm town um occurred because of the bowling leagues in that town There's a large new bowling alley and they had leagues bowling every night of the week except Sunday because that was the Sabbath so this is just a huge source of social integration in the 1970s he went back to the small town uh late in the early in the 1990s and he went went to the bowling alley he saw one bowler bowling alone but it happened while the town had lost population but people were also not bowly leagues had ceased to exist people were sitting at home watching TV he suggested this reflected the cultural shift away from collectivism and toward individualism an American society whether that's an exaggeration you can judge for yourself but it certainly makes the point of social change cultural values changing in families of course lower marriage rates comparing 1970 to 2005 more single mother households fewer fathers around increase no the existence of gay marriage which did not Ur in 1970 when our study began all those things have caused the family to take on new forms and of course this has led to a perception of a crisis in families families are losing their traditional forms and functions this is a quote from that Jal of marriage and the family uh paper by David pool it's actually 1997 not 1992 Traditional Values are declining in importance increase in religious NS youth are rejecting their parents values 35% of those Millennia have no religious affiliation in America we're experiencing a serious generation in gap in so that it's so bad that in America we need a day of prayer and fasting to repent decline Family Values this is spoken by an American presidential C candidate he is a candidate this year you can guess who he is no you can't because there are four or five or six candidates that would say but in this case he happened to give this speech in May and he happens to be the governor of the state of Texas nevertheless America is one of the most religious countries across the globe 92% of us according to 2012 poll say that we believe that God exists as compares to those Godless Brits and the sweds are impossible 72% say they pray almost daily 56% say religion is very important in their lives so there's this Paradox is the glass half empty or half full if your religious leader in America but anyway what does this have to do with values families are where kids learn values well they learn values from the media from the peers from schools but the family is gets there first and even in our fast moving individualistic culture there still is consensus that famili should be imparting notion right and wrong good and bad to their kids so are they we designed this study like Rick suggested in an attempt to find out the degree to which they appeared to be transmission or the extent to which we could see lack of transmission between Generations in family values values that were important to parents and families and uh I was blown away by what happened I was awakened on a Saturday in February by the telephone it was a call from my cousin in Minneapolis and he said hey Vern you made the Wall Street Journal I said what do you mean what do I done yeah there's a big article about your book it takes you know the whole page and it's a column and a half wide and of course I rushed right out after getting on my pajamas um and U bought every coffee I could find um it's hard in Santa Barbara to find a coffee for the Wall Street Journal at 7:00 in the morning um and here it was mothers and fathers often throw up their hands and let popular culture take over but parents have greater moral and religious influence than they think that's not a quote from me that was a quote from the reviewer I thought my gosh jeez I never expected this to happen if I got something in contemporary gerontology or the gerontologist as a review I would have been happy that Wall Street Journal following Friday my neighbor said hey Vern you take the New York Times I said no I'm limited to the new Los Angeles science because they report the scores of USC football although I've almost decided to drop my subscription fortunes the last few years parental bonds prove more important than their practices or their piety and passing on religious values what was it that made the findings in this book create so much public interest what do the data show about families that could make the gimlet eyed bottom line oriented editors of the Wall Street Journal think that somebody would want to pick up a book about families religion and generations that didn't have a single dollar sign anywhere in the book well there must be some kind of a hunger out there even among accountants and junk bond teers about family transmission and values and what's good and what is bad in the transmission process so Now's the Time to tell you about the methods of the study and I chose this picture because often graduate students feel that methods are like the dark drizzly D months of remember um this is the mill this is the house on the on your right where the picture is taken earlier and this is the year that they immigrated to America studying families and time we used uh the longitudinal study of generations that uh Allan helped to launch we used a mixed methods approach with survey data collected over eight waves and in-depth interviews that we collected in 2005 to 2008 so the quality quantitative data eight waves 356 multi-generational families were in the sample started in 1971 there were 2,000 individuals that were members of these 3 or 400 families um by 2000 by 2005 uh we picked up the fourth generation the great grandchildren of the original grandparents as they turned 65 as they turned 16 and so the num number there was 1776 uh because of the deaths of the oldest generation and the second oldest generation uh we picked our sample from uh the Kaiser Medical Group Southern and central California 840,000 members and I can tell you a little bit about that if if if you want to learn more about that it is not a nationally representative sample which in 2015 is a fatal flaw in design uh but which in um U 19 um70 1969 would have cost about $35 million to launch because that was back in the day before we had random digit longdistance styling and you have no idea how expensive it would have been to go house to house in every state in the nation to say you have a three generation family can we interview you and then it would have been impulsive so we have a cohort sequential design where we have for example the grandparent and grandchild G1 and G3 in 1970 and we have the G2 and G4 grandparent grandchild in 2005 and so we can follow that we can compare them at two points in time they're about the same age uh but they're different cohorts qualitative data in-depth interviews we pulled out a sample of 25 families from the 300 or so families in the larger Town um we were able to interview six of the original g1s our oldest respondent was 97 I think and she went she sat through a night a two an hour and a half interview who pauses for water she's wonderful and we could link the generations together to get a case study of the whole family across generations and that's what most of the book is it's uh qualitative case studies of families and of intergenerational relationships where there was and there was not evidence of transmission so we wanted to find out how much influence did we find intergenerationally on values how much has this changed in the three and a half decades since we started Gathering data a grandparents of much influence could ref find evidence that there was cross generational influence on three and then four generations and how about change over the life course with 35 years of data we can follow the same individuals over their life course in terms of values attitudes and behavior intergenerational continuity in 1910 my great grandmother with my grandfather um came to America and in the doorway there the woman holding the little baby is my grandmother and the little baby is my father and this whole true nine people came to America in the hull of a smelly migrant boat and landed in the middle of Minnesota where they had been promised that the streets were paved with gold and there was a fortune waiting every swed all they had to do was dig a little bit for it it was in the middle of winter my grandfather couldn't wait to get to America the snow drifts were that high and they were living in the upstairs two bedroom Farmhouse nine people intergenerational continuity in the context of social change somehow survived so here are four findings from the data five what our data indicated we expected to find a generation gap in religious values why because there's been so much social change and because we all know that parents aren't as relevant as they used to be these are standardized coefficients and anytime a sociologist sees a standardized coefficient between two groups that is higher than 2 he or she gets excited these standardized coefficients are much higher than 0 2 and they suggest that there is significant similarity on these four dimensions of religiosity between the parents in our sample and the children in our s and these are matched parent child diets um religious intensity is a variable that's indexed by um item and item such as uh how religious would you say you are very religious somewhat religious not very religious not at all religious so you could have a score of you a high correlation if both parent and both and child said they were very religious or that both parent and child said they were not religious so this is not a high religiosity scale so high parent child agreement and then the fifth measure had to do with religious affiliation are you a Baptist is your father a Baptist there we found lower similarity scores how about comparing over time we were surprised that we did not find a decline in intergenerational transmission over time and this shows the comparison between the two time periods only in religious affiliation was there a decline between 19970 and the Year 2005 so what predicts High similarity or transmission what accounts for low similarity transmission well in traditional socialization models the first and most important thing is role modeling right a second thing is is explicit tuition tuition so role modeling you do things that your child will follow you in explicit tuition you teach them the things in religion you got to not only take them to church you got to be in church yourself you've got to lead your child in prayers at home second you have to teach them about the Bible you have to teach them about your church Traditions right that's what you hear from the public no we found that emotional Bonds were more important than either of those two things particularly important was the father look at the difference in similarity scores between the relationships that were judged as close by the child and those that were not the factor is almost one of uh twice as much um similarity here's another way to look at it this is the uh these are the tra trajectories of high closeness High parent child closeness and I don't have a graph here but uh then we looked at gender differences and we found that closeness perception of closeness attributed by the child to the parent we also call this solidarity um did not make a significant difference on the part of the mother in other words whether the mother was perceived as close or distant was not statistically a prictor of high or low similarity but for the father difference was amazing so if you want to have your child follow you in values and your father is not sufficient if you are a deacon and preach every third Sunday and if you lead Bible study in your own home if you're a cold authoritarian Old Testament patriarchal type dad chances are you're not going to be successful in your socialization what about the religious nuns where do the non-religious Millennials in this story that you have heard about last week come from this is my other great-grandfather his name is sin and he did not follow the other side of the family into this religious fervor here he is in his 70s he's a cheerful old atheist and he had cheerful atheist children so when I visit Sweden I got one side of evangelicals to visit and another side of atheists visit and it's really interesting thing to bounce back and forth well we assump we hear the Assumption especially an interpretations of the data last week that the non-religious Millennials are rebelling against their parents they are discarding what their parents taught them they're never going to return so we looked at this we looked at how non-religious children come about and it's really interesting to think of uh and many of you in this room are in this situation or have been how do you teach your children moral and ethical values without a Sunday school to rely on without a youth group to rely on without the Bible without the sacraments without this whole institutional mechanism that your Christian neighbors have very interesting so the olical question well here's where the religious nuns come from this is uh a degree of parent child uh similarity for different uh denominations different religious groups and uh the black is U 19 is 2005 the gray is 20 1970 and what you can see is that in each group except for the Jews uh and the Mormons and they're a very small group um there has been a decline in the degree of parent child similarity except among the nuns and that's a huge increase over 35 years in the degree of parent child similarity that's very suggestive when you also look at the um percent of unaffiliated young adults whose parents are nuns this is really interesting now it could be argued that well that's just a matter of chance it's not the fact that there is any socialization going on it's just a matter of religious indifference on the part of both generations and that's why we looked in in depth in our interviews to see what was going on in those families and what we found was intense descriptions of how the non-religious parents attempted to pass on their strong beliefs in right and wrong in good and bad to their children and the absence of these institutional parameters that uh were uh available to religious parents how about Grand parents this is my grandfather and grandmother They carried on the Evangelical tradition we've got to look beyond the nuclear family uh that's what our pollster friends and our politicians are still focused on but what we see here is that there is a statistically significant degree of similarity and influence and even more surprising the degree of influence has not changed over the period of time of this study how about this life course effect want to introduce you to Carl Johansson's great great great grandson who happens to be my grandson and he like Carl Johansson is a fervent Evangelical he and my daughter live in the Bible in the Buckle of the Bible Belt of California which is tomacula and uh they go to a Missouri Senate Lutheran Church there which is very fervently Evangelical of course he's also fervent swed that's the Swedish flag for his family traditions now this is a only because we have this cohort sequential design can we Trace long-term longitudinal patterns of religiosity as well as cohort patterns so here you have each of our cohorts G1 G2 G3 G4 as we have been able to measure them across time and I won't spend much time on this just kind of keep this but here's sort of the life course pattern that we're building following age 18 is this downward that's what this poll was picking up Millennials dropping out of organizer the but our data don't focus on just church membership they include these other four variables so we have much more Nuance then after age 28 or so about that this say tick upward then there's a spike upward in the 30s then there's a plateau through middle age and then there's a slight curve upward about 870 and then there's a pronounced curve upward in the last years two messages here number one there's a life course to religiosity which is almost completely ignored by pollsters it's changed people don't stay the same number two there's a lot high probability that people who drop out of a strong religious faith will return to it because that's what our data show not everybody number three if you just look at cross-sectional data you lose the story because change over time in terms of looking at cohorts is not the same as development over time looking at individuals so is there a crisis in family values today I don't think so I think family bonds and family influences are strong I think multi-generational bonds as I argued in a 2002 peace and journal marriage and the family are stronger than ever before in American history and that's because we have longer years of shared lives between children grandchildren and probably because families are more involved grandparents are more involved um than they have been ever before there's an article in today's uh um USA Today about this I'll get into it in the question and answer session if you're interested is there a generation gap in values like religion today well there's substantial generational differ similarities there are differences but to say there's a gap there's you know something that can't be bridged the polls about these religious nuns equate religion with church membership and churches are changing and a lot of people who say they have no religious affiliation are actually religious Seekers they haven't chosen a church they may not ever choose a church but that doesn't mean they're not religious or spiritual are parents failing to pass on values I don't think so and equality is really important if you're a parent and you want to see your children benefit from the hard lessons that you've learned in life about what's the most important thing in life and what's good and what's value and what's beautiful our grandparents relevant well I'm preaching to the choir here because you all know what they are so families matter thank [Music] [Applause] [Music] you great so um thank you for finishing uh with 10 full minutes at least of Q&A which is terrific this is a group that loves to ask questions and good questions so uh let's just go ahead and open it up who'd like to start come on now don't let me down Rob excellent very much enjoyed this I'm actually quite curious you you showed the um kind of the what you say the the sociologist dream slide with standardized estimates above point to and kind of talking about the um the the on diagonals and representing there is this strong sort of similarity I'm wondering if you've been able to to dig into the data in terms of off diagonals where there's an in congruence between between the diags and such and you know how has that helped shape your thinking and inform what what we know about this intergenerational transmission okay uh I'm so glad you asked that question because not only is it profound it also lets me allows me to make a um um a um well I'll just be blatant about it I need help if there's anybody here who wants to help me like Hi l if there's anybody here who would like to help me uh look at the data and examine this I would appreciate it because it's a complicated question and U I don't have the tools uh nor do I have The Graduate students right now in the new position I'm in in the School of Social Work to address it um we the thing that I have focused on is the qualitative data and I do have case study materials uh where I can talk about that and there's a chapter in the book about religious Rebels and they're very interesting uh and why people fall away from the faith is very interesting and just a real brief uh uh example um there's a Mormon kid whose name is Austin um in his questionnaire uh in 2000 1992 he talked about how he was looking forward to his mission um his dad he is a descendant of gamy young his dad was very very prominent in the church uh we interviewed him in 2005 he was no longer a Mormon um and we asked why and he gave his story that he went on his mission he had what he called a nervous breakdown was actually a psychotic episode um he asked to be sent home the U bishop and the mission uh said no uhuh you got a commitment um he went home anyway his dad was absolutely Furious he said you have kitted to God um he said I couldn't handle it he said I had to leave he married a non-mormon who was excommunicated from the church his mother stood by him his father will not talk to him now that's an example of a father who was a role model who taught everything and it was cold okay that's an example of the outlier okay now that's just a case study but with sufficient statistical sophistication I think you can tease out those kinds of examples excellent another question Monica um I'm interested in knowing when you looked at the different family configurations such as single mothers or um other family configurations than the nuclear mother father with kids what kind of data did you find examining the religious affiliation or religiosity with those families do you have an example I mean um what are you thinking of divorce or sure yeah okay well we have one chapter that uh examines uh two Dimensions uh one is uh families in which of quote mixed marriage in terms of where there's there was a difference in the uh denomination or the faith at time of marriage and then the second was a a breakup in the marriage in both cases there was lower rates of trans were lower rates of transmission and uh that's the statistical part that's a survey part everybody knows that okay so now the fun part is to look at the qualitative data and uh story after story about how these things are negotiated and who follows who you know and for me to give any generalization about that of patterns I just I can't do it I can't see it just so many individual differences yeah so I can't answer your question very usefully did you have um families that were maybe a second or third generation immigrant or the children we differently than their no all our sample was blue stable Blue Collar families in Southern California so I guess in line with Monica's question my name is Katie and um I was wondering if you have families who started within nuclear family and then maybe the the current generation has maybe the single mom the dad's not in the picture and then the child is now older and um what are those are the families that you're saying that when the father is not in the picture that the these that did that wasn't true no I'm saying about the cold father well I mean what if the father even around like there's no father father ABS so that means cold father that's really cold uh well um in the first place our analysis started out at a dietic letter level so what we're talking about in that case is the mother's influence on the child and then we went to the triotic level and uh so then separated okay here are the triotic families and here are the dietic families in many cases where the father was absent we didn't have idea so we couldn't make those comparisons um sort related to all this um why do you think that there wasn't much influence of the quality of mother um do you have a thought about that yeah that's the opposite side of the F of of the of the question is how on Earth could we find that the fathers were so influential when everybody knows the fathers are irrelevant most people don't ask the question in quite that offensive a way but yeah I didn't mean that you did um I don't exactly know except that um some a u in in at at Columbia University last fall um there was a rabbi in the room who had the courage to stand up and say there's something about religion that is male oriented he said I don't mean to be sexist about this but every major religion in the world has had a male figure as the head rightly or wrongly and he says I I I I happen to believe in y's archetypes and you know so uh in and and and then somebody sitting beh beside him a woman said yeah but um it may be that parent that fathers are so irrelevant in so many other ways in the family that this is the only way that they shine and everybody laughs so I don't know I really don't know these these socialization uh the socialization theories uh they both drop out type four they both convert to become a Baptist all kinds of combinations that we didn't have enough data to to parse out all those dimensions and uh when we did it on gender lines it got messed up because uh uh then then the issue of divorce also came up and oh we got to so I don't know okay can I tell you one story that's really interesting this about Grandparents um we we came up with four patterns of grandparent influence that we could find and one was the grandparents reinforcing the parents influence there similarity um second was uh grandparents the generation uh what you call Bo Skip's generation influence third was the grandparents I like Ching Bo the grandparents subverting the parents influence okay here's the Goldbergs they're devout Jews they have a son his name is uh uh James uh he goes a ray he marries a fundamentalist marriage doesn't last but they've got two kids okay so here are these Jewish grandparents fundamentalist daughter and ex-daughter-in-law two kids the kids come and spend every holiday with their grandparents the grandparents take them and try to teach them Jewish laws and Jewish theology mom picks them up she takes him home sits him down tells them all this stuff's wrong we interviewed one of the boys he tells us a story what are the boys they're evangelicals now that's an example of mixed faith and the negotiation of that mixed Faith across three generations so you see how complicated when you were talking about religiosity has a life course and I was looking at the slides it appeared to me that religiosity increased during critical developmental points marriage children near death did any of your qualitative interviews talk about why people may have become more religious at and at those points well this is one of those tragedies of of of being a researcher you always find out stuff after you've gathered your data but wish you wish you had known before if I'd had any inkling of that I would have said hey do some prompts for that so the next research project is going to be exactly that um religious development and later life why some people increase why some people stay the same and I'm absolutely fascinated by the issue of how and why some people in their later years drop out of religion or do like job was asked to do curse God and die anybody would like to help me and that i' like some graduation here thank youi excellent thanks so much [Applause] so